Northeast Bronx

Baychester:
Between the colonial settlements of Westchester and Eastchester, at the mouth of the Hutchinson River and the head of Eastchester Bay, this flat and marshy section was devoted to farming in the nineteenth century. Later plans for an airfield and a brief life as an amusement park were succeeded.

Bronx River:
The Indians called it Aquahung. Settlers named it after Jonas Bronck, the earliest European farmer along the East River shore of the mainland: it was "Bronck's River." Beginning in Westchester County, near Kensico Reservoir, it winds fifteen miles southward to the base of Hunt's Point, where it enters the East River. Along the way, it cuts through Bronx Park in the dramatic gorge of the New York Botanical Garden, and touches Williamsbridge, West Farms, Soundview, and other Bronx communities. It is the major geographical divider of the borough, the boundary between the hilly areas and the eastern coastal plain, the border between the wards of "North New York" on the Harlem side, annexed in 1874 and given an urban infrastructure, and the much-later-developing sections of lower Westchester. The importance of the river even seems to show up in our borough's name. Why do we add a definite article—that is, call it "the Borough of THE Bronx" rather than "the Borough of Bronx"? (Compare "the Borough of Brooklyn," for instance.) Some experts think it's because the name really denotes "the borough of the Bronx River."

Fordham:
Fordham ("village by the ford") refers to a settlement near a shallow crossing of the Harlem River, until 1693 the only entry to Manhattan from the north. The large manor which took the name originally stretched from the Harlem to the Bronx River, and south from what is today Kingsbridge Road to Highbridge. Divided into farms after the failure of the original sixteenth-century grantholder, John Archer, Fordham's rural anonymity went undisturbed until the New York and Harlem Railroad, pushing north, opened a station at what is now Fordham Road and Webster Avenue in 1841. Two responses to this new accessibility are recalled by sites in the neighborhood. In 1845 Edgar Allan Poe brought his ailing wife from Manhattan to rural Fordham. On Grand Concourse, across the street from its original location, stands the cottage where the Poes lived, and where he wrote "Annabell Lee" and "The Bells". Even closer to the railroad line is the campus of Fordham University, which was opened by Bishop John Hughes as St.John's College in 1841. Like most of the northern Bronx, the Fordham area remained dormant until cheap public transportation upplemented the rail line. In rapid succession, the Third Avenue El (1903), the Jerome Avenue IRT (1914), and the IND under Grand Concourse (1933) opened the neighborhood to emigrees from Manhattan and the lower Bronx. By the 'thirties Fordham Road, the main east-west thoroughfare, had replaced 149th Street as the borough's major shopping and entertainment center.


Riverdale:
From 1851 the New York and Hudson Railroad, running along the east shore of the river, offered a connection between Manhattan and a stop at Riverdale-on-Hudson, today's 254th Street. The ridge above the station filled with the estates of wealthy commuters. Greyston (1864), Alderbrook (1880), Stonehurst (1861), and Oaklawn (1863) are mansions which survive; there's also a Riverdale Historic District, calling attention to houses which were once the outbuildings and carriage houses of the grand estates. A bridge and parkway connection to Manhattan brought new houses, smaller but not less opulent, in the decade before World War Two. Today, many of the original estates have been sold or donated to institutions—the Wave Hill Center for Environmental Studies, Riverdale Country School, the Greyston Conference Center among them.


Woodlawn:
The nineteenth-century taste for landscaped, park-like burial grounds was gratified by the opening of Woodlawn Cemetery in 1865. Unlike its predecessor, Brooklyn's Green-Wood, rural Woodlawn could be easily reached from Manhattan on the Harlem railroad, which had entered the area in the 1840s. The burial of Admiral David Farragut in 1870 established the reputation of Woodlawn with the New York elite, many of whom commissioned prominent architects to design their mausoleums on the Bronx River hillside. The neighborhood grew with the cemetery. In 1873 forty to fifty houses in the area just to the north, once part of Philipse manor, later the farm of Gilbert Valentine, were incorporated as the village of Woodlawn. The Irish and Italian character of the area was determined in the 1890s, when the construction of the second Croton Aqueduct brought a new population of workers to the village.